‘Is man no more than this?’ - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

‘Is man no more than this?’. King Lear and the Collapse of Civilisation. The collapse of civilisation. Freud: Civilization and its Discontents (1930) . According to Freud, man is ‘a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’ (1962: 59).

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According to Freud, man is ‘a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’ (1962: 59).

‘The word “civilization” describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes – namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.’ (1962: 36)

‘This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions.’ (1962: 42)

‘The play is a mighty philosophic farce in which the leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded stage that resembles, at the end, a desert graveyard or unpeopled planet. It is an ungoverned world … a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution.’ (1967: 132)

LEAR. Allow not nature more than nature needs,Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. (2.2.425-6)

LEAR. Is man no more but this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.93-8)

‘The timing of these two deaths must surely be seen as cruelly, precisely, subversive: instead of complying with the demands of formal closure … the play concludes with two events which sabotage the prospect of both closure and recuperation.’ (Dollimore 2010: 203)

Lear begins to speak in the third person when he realises that his former social identity is not the same as his current one:

LEAR. Doth any here know me? Why, this is not Lear.Doth Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?Either his notion weakens, or his discerningsAre lethargied. Sleeping or waking, ha? Sure, ’tis not so.Who is it that can tell me who I am?Lear’s shadow? I would learn that, for by the marks Of sovereignty, knowledge, and reasonI should be false persuaded I had daughters. (1.4.220-8)

‘Shadow’ and ‘marks of sovereignty’ – authority is about outward signs…

LEAR. Hark, nature, hear: Dear goddess, suspend thy purpose if Thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful.Into her womb convey sterility.Dry up in her the organs of increase,And from her derogate body never springA babe to honour her. (1.4.268-74)

REGAN. I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. (2.2.359)

LEAR. I will have such revenges on you bothThat all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are, yet I know not; but they shall beThe terrors of the earth. (2.2.438-41)

The play takes on an increasingly absurd and tragicomic tone as Lear progresses into madness.

Railing against the storm – a futile attempt to exert control over nature.

‘When Lear strips off his clothes to reveal himself as “unaccommodated man,” Shakespeare boldly reveals the natural body of the king as one that appears to bear little value in its own right.’ (Tennenhouse 1986: 139)

James’s fool Archie Armstrong ‘treated the king and men of high rank with astonishing familiarity’ (Patterson 1989: 106).

James rewarded his favourites at court by granting them monopolies (exclusive privileges to trade in a particular commodity):

KENT. This is not altogether fool, my lord.

FOOL. No, faith; lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t, and ladies too, they will not let me have all fool to myself – they’ll be snatching. (1.4.146-50)

James’s authority to ‘coin’ was also being debated around 1606:

LEAR. No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself. (4.5.83-4)

St. Stephen’s Day was a key date in the festive calendar, during the period of ‘Misrule’.

It was, according to Leah Marcus, ‘the holiday most associated with the granting of traditional hospitality… the high were to look out in pity upon the tribulations of the low’ (1988: 154):

‘The preservation of old holiday customs was a very important policy matter for King James I. He had already issued royal proclamations calling for the keeping of open house during the Christmas season according to the traditional “laws” of hospitality; a decade or so later, he would codify his position in the Book of Sports.’ (1988: 156)

FOOL. (to Kent) Prithee, tell him so much the rent of his land comes to. He will not believe a fool.

LEAR. A bitter fool.

FOOL. Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?

LEAR. No, lad. Teach me.

FOOL. (sings) That lord that counsell’d theeTo give away thy land,Come, place him here by me;Do thou for him stand.The sweet and bitter foolWill presently appear,The one in motley here,The other found out there.

King Lear does not, then, offer us a straight choice between tyrannical authority on the one hand, and destructive chaos on the other.

‘King Lear is the greatest Marxist play ever written.’ (Cicely Berry, voice director of the RSC, at the British Shakespeare Association conference, February 2012)

Authority, it seems, is simply the ownership and control of physical resources (‘land’), and enforced only by a combination of actual and threatened violence (soldiers), and empty ideological signs (‘titles’, ‘marks of sovereignty’).

It could be argued that the play offers only a hollow and superficial reaffirmation of patriarchal values at the end of the play.

Freud concluded Civilization and its Discontents with the following observation:

‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.’ (1962: 92)

At the height of the play’s cruelty, three unnamed servants behave in a way which provides the play’s most hopeful answer to Freud’s question (in the Quarto, at least)…

In Act 3 Scene 7 (the blinding of Gloucester), Shakespeare presents what Richard Strier describes as ‘the most radical possible sociopolitical act in a way that can only be interpreted as calling for his audience’s approval’ (1988: 119).

As Robert Shaughnessy puts it, ‘for a servant to “stand up thus” (3.7.83) is not only an act of rebellion but a theatrical coup comparable to a piece of scenery coming to life to berate the actors’ (2011: 244).